The Fox News Effect: Sea Level Edition

The Fox News Effect: Sea Level Edition

Climate scientists–and other scientists–are always improving and updating their methods. That’s how science works. And it’s a very good and honorable thing–or at least, it is until conservatives catch on to some particular methodological change and argue that it’s political, rather than part of the normal course of scientific events.

In the latest case, a group at the University of Colorado at Boulder added a new correction to their estimates of global sea level rise. What they did is pretty technical, but before going further I’ll have to briefly explain it—more details can be found here.

A correction for glacial isostatic adjustment—or GIA—was recently added to the Colorado group’s estimates of the rate of sea level rise. This was done because even as sea level is rising (due to the thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of land-based ice), the land in some areas is also rising a bit, increasing the size of the ocean basins. Why is the land rising? It’s a “rebound” from the disappearance of massive land based glaciers since the last ice age.

Any questions so far?

So the Colorado scientists added a correction to take into account GIA, so that they could measure–in isolation–how much total water volume is being added to the ocean. Due to the rising of land, this cannot be simply inferred from measuring the sea level along the coastline.

Here’s a somewhat comprehensible explanation from the University of Colorado website:

…we have to account for the fact that the ocean is actually getting bigger due to GIA at the same time as the water volume is expanding. This means that if we measure a change in [global mean sea level] of 3 mm/yr, the volume change is actually closer to 3.3 mm/yr because of GIA….We apply a correction for GIA because we want our sea level time series to reflect purely oceanographic phenomena. In essence, we would like our [global mean sea level] time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes. This is what is needed for comparisons to global climate models, for example, and other oceanographic datasets.

Faced with the embarrassing fact that sea level is not rising nearly as much as has been predicted, the University of Colorado’s NASA-funded Sea Level Research Group has announced it will begin adding a nonexistent 0.3 millimeters per year to its Global Mean Sea Level Time Series. As a result, alarmists will be able to present sea level charts asserting an accelerating rise in sea level that is not occurring in the real world.&

Note: Taylor himself admits that the consequences of this correction will only be “1.2 inches over the course of the 21st century.” In other words, if sea level rise is a big deal, then the correction in question certainly isn’t.

Steve Nerem, the director of the widely relied-upon research center, told FoxNews.com that his group added the 0.3 millimeters per year to the actual sea level measurements because land masses, still rebounding from the ice age, are rising and increasing the amount of water that oceans can hold. “We have to account for the fact that the ocean basins are actually getting slightly bigger… water volume is expanding,” he said, a phenomenon they call glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA).

Taylor calls it tomfoolery.

“There really is no reason to do this other than to advance a political agenda,” he said.

Actually, we’ve already seen the entirely non-political reason to do this.

Don’t make me laugh, climaterealists are anything but real about climate change.

Bob Carter and Heartland in the mix here - that is the same Heartland Institute that tried to prop up tobacco industry profits by creating false doubt about the dangers of SHTS (second hand tobacco smoke for those with short memories - or none as the case may be).

climaterealists (CR) is an Orwellian exercise in naming right at the start.

Here is more on the Cretinous Retards (title earned because their actions condemn their own descendents to lives of misery and the CRs cannot even realise that - so much for any reality eh!):

“As was shown by Charles Darwin years ago, the tropical islands like the Maldives they change their level according to sea level” - Piers Corbyn,

if he does not at the same time explain how long it takes for the organisms that construct the reefs upon which such are built to add height in the context of an accelerated rise since about 1900 (see note [1] below) and also a rapidly changing ph value of oceanic water which is going to slow them down or even stop them.

If you follow the trail, you would see that the non-story started earlier on WattsUpWithThat, then a few blog regurgitations of those posts, then Taylor’s rewording of WUWT and its comments, then finally Lott, who threw in Christy. Basically churnalism of blog posts. None of them did any real investigative journalism until Media Matters took up the piece; the others just speculated about a conspiracy that didn’t exist.

Where do you get this fantasy that FF companies pay people to be skeptics?

You do realize that fossil fuel companies spend millions of dollars a year on getting their viewpoint across. While the likes of Greenpeace and WWF spend hundreds of millions, and funded researchers spend billions. No comparison.

Where do you get this fantasy that FF companies pay people to be skeptics?

You do realize that fossil fuel companies spend millions of dollars a year on getting their viewpoint across. While the likes of Greenpeace and WWF spend hundreds of millions, and funded researchers spend billions. No comparison.

The fat cats are on your side of the argument. You are doing their bidding.

There are fat cats on both sides of the argument. There are plenty of greedy capitalists looking to profit from global warming and they will spin the half truths to their advantage as well as any oil ceo. In fact it will end up being the same guys who will be raking in gov subsidies for churning out toxic solar panels and useless wind turbines.

what skeptical science has to say on this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

What the science says…
Since the hockey stick paper in 1998, there have been a number of proxy studies analysing a variety of different sources including corals, stalagmites, tree rings, boreholes and ice cores. They all confirm the original hockey stick conclusion: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and that warming was most dramatic after 1920…While many continue to fixate on Mann’s early work on proxy records, the science of paleoclimatology has moved on. Since 1999, there have been many independent reconstructions of past temperatures, using a variety of proxy data and a number of different methodologies. All find the same result - that the last few decades are the hottest in the last 500 to 2000 years (depending on how far back the reconstruction goes).

But I suppose we should just believe an anonymous Koch-sucker like you?

what skeptical science has to say on this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

What the science says…
Since the hockey stick paper in 1998, there have been a number of proxy studies analysing a variety of different sources including corals, stalagmites, tree rings, boreholes and ice cores. They all confirm the original hockey stick conclusion: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and that warming was most dramatic after 1920…While many continue to fixate on Mann’s early work on proxy records, the science of paleoclimatology has moved on. Since 1999, there have been many independent reconstructions of past temperatures, using a variety of proxy data and a number of different methodologies. All find the same result - that the last few decades are the hottest in the last 500 to 2000 years (depending on how far back the reconstruction goes).

But I suppose we should just believe an anonymous Koch-sucker like you?

Oh goodie the troll bot is back, and there goes the signal-to-noise ratio.

Said troll is OK with Fox lying and smearing and slandering, and does not know what the GIA is. OK got it :)

His juvenile diatribes were cute, they are now boring and predictable and vacuous. And citing WFUWT is not helping his “case”, Watts has no credibility except in the minds of his uncritical and unskeptical followers. So quoting propaganda from a shill to Limbaugh and Inhofe and friends is not helping. Oh , and neither does FauxNews, the above revelation is a case in point. But Anon keep fighting for the climate denialist industry and disinformation scam machine, you need to sharpen up your intellect though. You area perfect, shining example of why your ilk have no credibility or honour.

I’m sure Anon also thinks Monckton and Fauxnews are the epitaph of credibility and honor and scientific knowledge;)

In case you did not know, Maxim Lott is the son of John Lott - the author of the infamous “More guns, Less crime” and former AEI scholar. If Maxim learned about science from his father, his knowledge is skewed and warped.

I particularly liked how Fox claimed that the adjustment was “sparking criticism from experts”, then they go on to quote from Taylor, a lawyer with no science background, and Christy, a legitimate climate scientist but one whose expertise is satellite analysis of the atmosphere. Nobody who actually works at measuring sea level changes was relied on for the hit piece. And it is not as if the CU researchers tried to do something underhanded and sneaky; they are the ones who posted on their website the changes that were going to happen, and exactly why. The Drudge headline is therefore the more egregiously dishonest; nobody “caught” them doing anything - they stated the GIA correction openly and without any prompting. And if someone does not like the new correction, they can just subtract .3mm a year and use that number instead.

Continental rebounding is meaningless. Sea level measurement has always been about the sea overtaking the land, moving up the beach and flooding low lying cities. Thats what we talk about and that is what we should measure. Fox has a point here boys but you are too antifox to see it.

The Sea Level Research Group at University of Colarado now makes an adjustment to forecast rise in sea-level to account for glacial isostatic adjustment of the continental lithosphere following deglaciation. Fair enough.

There is nothing wrong per se with including such an adjustment. However, what concerns me is the assumptions that have gone into determining the magnitude of the adjustment and its sign.

First comment…

There is no doubt that icecaps loaded the continental lithosphere at high latitudes, depressing the bedrock surface and causing flowage of the mantle away from the loaded regions. However, this may not have been true in all regions. The problem is that creation of the ice caps necessarily locked up as ice, some of the water that formerly occupied the oceans (in the main). This resulted in sub-aerial exposure of continental margins globally that were formerly underwater, indeed several hundred metres underwater. Continental margins globally were isostatically unloaded of ocean water and this would have resulted in their isostatic uplift, with consequent flowage of mantle from beneath the ocean basins into the uplifting regions resulting in an increase in the volume of the ocean basins.

Conversely, at high latitudes, once sub-aerially exposed, the continental margins were areas where glacial ice was able to accumulate. In some areas the glacial loading of the continental margins is likely to exceeded that produced by ocean water loading, acting to reduce ocean basin capacity as mantle flowed oceanward away from the so-loaded margins. In other areas, glacial loading may have been less than ocean water loading, acting to increase ocean basin capacity as mantle below the ocean basins would have flowed towards these margins.

The continental margins and ocean basins are now isostatically recovering globally from the effects of high-latitude ice cap formation. How they are recovering depends on the relative sizes of the water and ice loads that they once had and the water loads they are regaining. Deducing the magnitude and sign of any correction factor to be made to measured rates of modern sea level rise, is going to be heavily dependant on knowing how the size of the water and ice loads on the continental margins has changed. It would be interesting to know if this has been done.

Second comment…

The rate that icecaps melt, have melted, or can melt, is almost certainly several orders of magnitude faster than the continental lithosphere below the ice can isostatically recover. Large parts of the bedrock of Greenland and Antarctica are depressed by glacial loading, to an altitude below modern sealevel. As glacial ice has melted from these areas and water returned to the oceans, regions of bedrock loaded by ice to below sea-level have been inundated by the oceans. There this inundation is occuring even though the formerly ice-loaded regions are undergoing isostatic uplift in response to removal of a greater ice load than that now provided ocean water. Eventually, of course, these depressed regions will isostatically recover and emerge from beneath the oceans. The upshot is that there is a time lag between glacial ice load removal and isostatic recovery of the crust below that provides the creation of accomodation space for ocean water. This lag acts in the short term to moderate the rise in global sealevels. Has this effect been considered when determining the sign and magnitude of the adjustment factor?

Long story short, determining the magnitude and sign of an isostatic adjustment to modern sea-level rise is potentially fraught with difficulties and can be presumed to highly dependent on the history of the loadings the continental margins were subjected to, and the relative magnitudes of water and ice loadings. This calculation is likely to be further complicated by several other factors. Firstly, the rheology of the mantle below the margins and ocean basins, determining the rate of mantle flow possible, the possible flow rate being determined by mantle temperature and geothermal gradient. Secondly, the infilling of the ocean basins by glaciogenic sediment eroded from the land.

Gravity/GPS measurements are doing quite correctly their jobs, especially for inland areas. I would venture from my personal small experience about this topic that the error bars are about one millimeter, or even less. Compared with the 5mm/year scandinavian uplift, results are therefore quite robust.

And lol at the guy who loled first. He doesn’t even know about Earth’s interior, and he thinks he knows enough to unravel a conspiracy ?
But he’s useful : the more he rants like this, the more educated people are convinced about AGW just by looking at the sheer lunacy of the hysteric WUWTpeople

Hey Hugo. What do you think of Fox telling “the other side of the story”? Ahhh the dilemma for you. On one hand you don’t like liars ( well left leaning ones), but on the other hand you say it’s good that Fox is around & they provide balance. But yet you also say you believe in AGW. Ahhh the conundrum.

skeptical science. and why go right to name calling? i believe that happens when you have nothing to say. but let me get this straight….ur saying there was no mwp? and btw, people who call other people cock suckers usually are the ones with that on their minds.

straight, self-refuting denier talking points. I hope you and your various sock-puppet clones/clowns are getting paid well by the Kochs, because the devil owns your soul. Selling out your children and grandchildren for a few bucks. You are the very lowest of the low.

Another point : to my knowledge, GIA should in the end get a zero gravity average over the globe (you redistribute only mass). Since the characteristic time is quite long (from my faulty memory, I found zeros at the millenia time scale) and slower than the ice melt, you get this small correction.
I guess.

Every time the Climate Scientology Cult is exposed and caught red-handed in another of their frauds, the paid shills at James Hoggan & Associates Public Relations Inc. desperately try to spin the facts.

‘3. The MWP Was indeed global and Does indeed show that the little warm spell of the 1990s was nothing unpressidented [sic] and perfectly natural.

the evidence has been linked here many many times, but like true deniers you all just pretend it does not exist or your try to smear the site owner or some other lame AGW scam tactic.’

No the medieval climate optimum was not global and not persistent in any one area for the length of that period. Don’t believe in fairy tales.

So, ‘the evidence has been linked to here many times’, show us the colour of YOUR money.

I suspect CO2Nonsense, ClimateRetards, We Use Wishfull Thinking and Joanne Cod-piece will be in there somewhere, and who knows maybe even Climate Fraudit or Denial Despot. Sludge from those places is just that, sludge, so try to be a little more sensible and rational eh!

Soon, Idso and Baliunas are demonstrably cherry pickers but then so are the rest of that sorry lot, besides that 2003 paper was a crock.

Surely you know that by now? Must be a bit slow if you don’t.

Well if you are slow then this will educate (note these are only starting places for you to go search the relevant scientific literature rather than simply believing what the ‘howler’ monkeys on the denial ‘jungle drums’ tell you:

And since I said YOUR opinion is worthless YOU have just said you can’t read.

So, where are YOUR facts?

That page doesn’t actually prove the MWP global. The site is made up so that you are unable to use it to prove anything about the MWP.

As proof, I give the FACT that you, anon, cannot explain the length of the “global” MWP, the time of maximum temperature, and the global average temperature at that time.

If you had actually understood (or, indeed, ever TRIED to understand) that site, you’d be able to explain these values. They are rather central to any hypothesis of a *Global* MWP and whether it is hotter than today.

@ Chris Mooney;
No matter how you try to spin this story it STILL smacks of ‘Hide the decline’! Even if there is a shred of justification for these adjustments it’s very bad policy at a time when increasing numbers of people are losing faith in that part of the scientific community that is pushing the CAGW mantra.
How about everybody just reporting the numbers as they stand, not ‘adjusted’ for any reason. That might bring back some credibility to the science. Hank

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.